Act of Vengeance

by Michael Jecks

  He looked over at her, frowning.

  ‘It’d make sense,’ she said. There was a note of disapproval in her voice as she continued. ‘Some guys give up after PTS. I’ve seen men from my college who were bright, clever, the lot, and after they came back from Iraq they were different. They saw things, did things, they shouldn’t’ve. Knew one, he was only a boy, who came back and on his first day home, he heard a truck going over a metal plate. You know, they’re doing roadworks, and shoved a steel plate over the hole? This guy, he heard the bang, and dove under the nearest stoop. Took them ages to get him out again. He was crying and, oh, it was terrible. I know a few who went to the tables to gamble soon as they could. Wouldn’t surprise me if this Sumner was like that. He was known to the barista there at the Sahara, after all. She said he was there most days.’

  ‘OK, go check,’ Frank said. ‘And while you do that, I’ll see what I can find out about the two in the car’s trunk. What they were doing there, I don’t know.’

  *

  22.34 Las Vegas; 06.34 London

  Jack had put on a dark T-shirt. It was a tight fit over his belly, but he pulled it over his head and tucked it into his dark slacks. Hopefully there would be little need for heavy shoes, he thought.

  The hotel had a small computer room, but it was clearly not designed for extensive work. Businessmen were expected to have their own computers, not to want to use a hotel system. The machine itself was antiquated, oddly out of place among the splendours of the Bellagio, and lay in a poky little room on the first floor. Still, it was adequate for his needs, and Jack settled in front of it, entering a request for telephone directories in Vegas. There wasn’t one, and Jack swore to himself at the thought that the man could have gone ex-directory. He wondered for a moment whether there was a way to hack into the telephone company computers, but dismissed it. He had no computer skills, let alone his own computer – it wasn’t remotely possible.

  Instead, he thought he’d try a different tack. He dialled the number for the Mirage and said he was calling from Triple K Kable Security Systems. He wanted to have the name of the man in charge of security so he could write to introduce new products.

  ‘Sorry, sir, but we don’t take unsolicited calls from salespeople.’

  ‘That’s fine. I wouldn’t expect you to. But I have Mr Sorensen’s name already. I only wanted his correct initials so I can address the letter OK. He can always throw it into the wastebasket if he wants nothing to do with us, but at least I’ll have done my job. You know how it is.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. And it will end in the basket, you know? Don’t expect miracles from him.’

  ‘Hey, my boss just wants the job done by the numbers.’

  ‘Right. OK, then. His full name is F. Peter Sorensen.’

  ‘Know what the “F” is for?’

  ‘Fred, I think. But he never uses it. He’s always Peter.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  With thanks, he closed the line and checked on the screen again. There was only one F. P. Sorensen, and when he looked on the map of the city, he soon found the road. Heatherley was easy to find.

  Jack picked up his bag and shoved in some small items before setting off. He wanted to learn all he could about Sorensen, and he had an idea that the man’s house could hold some relevant secrets.

  *

  22.41 Las Vegas; 06.41 London

  Stilson was glad to have escaped the police at the Sahara. Now he was determined to finish his jobs here and get away. The city would soon become a dangerous place for him, and he had no intention of being discovered.

  He knew the way he was going. It would mean a late night, but there was no way around that. He must go somewhere and rest up, then return very early in the morning. It was the problem with Vegas, he always found. This was truly the city that didn’t sleep. As soon as the night fell, the whole place woke up. That was especially true of security managers in a casino. Sorensen wouldn’t be home before four at the earliest. No point being there to meet him. Better to drive out here and doze and get back early to find him.

  The place he was going to was at the edge of the city out towards the east, in a road called Heatherley. The houses here were sumptuous. They were the kind of places a middle-ranking White House official would look to, thinking to get a little of the genuine Vegas atmosphere, while not wanting the kids to see the adverts for whores that stayed stuck in the chain-link fences all around the Strip. These houses smelled of money, but not too much. They were not the sorts of houses the professional gamblers would go to. They’d stay in trailer parks or rented apartments until the big one came in (if it ever did) at which point they’d bypass Heatherley and move to a ranch or one of the serious apartment blocks overlooking the Strip.

  Stilson knew this house. It was a really good size, with a bronze roof, Mexican styling, and three immense Yukkas in a line overlooking the brick driveway. Beside the front door there was a little gravelled area, with a fountain, to show that the guy had money and access to water. Big deal. Stilson could see from here that he’d upgraded his security, too. It wasn’t too uncommon for a man like him to get a cheap deal on his home cameras, once he’d helped get the casino deal for the security company. Stilson knew that the security here was very good. He knew that more cameras covered every angle on the house, that they covered the side walls, the doors, windows, even the rear yard’s fencing. And of course the gravel to the sides and at the front served the secondary purpose of making anyone’s steps audible. Then there were metal grilles on the windows and the door, which had a reinforced steel plate in the middle. This was a secure house for a bachelor.

  Selecting ‘Drive’, Stilson took the car away, round the corner, and then north on Hubbell, and before long he was out of the city itself and driving up into the hills. The Lake Mead Road climbed up the side and to the north of Frenchman Mountain, and then he was up in the valley area.

  He remembered all this. It was the land where his father had lived and died – a dry, harsh, unforgiving land. And Ed Stilson had been a tough, unforgiving old bastard, ideally suited for the land. He owned a chunk of the action down there in the plain, but when some businessmen told him they were going to take his land, he ought to have taken the cash they offered, not stood calling them sons-a-bitches and mothers who’d play a trick for a dime. That sort of language was all right to Ed Stilson, because he lived on his own pretty much, with only his little son to help him.

  They returned that night, with Molotov cocktails and rifles, and old Ed Stilson learned the cost of digging his heels into the Nevada dirt. He dug them in all right. All the way six feet under. Silly son of a bitch.

  Stilson was searching for a particular place out here. It was the place where he brought his first girlfriend, the daughter of a stripper at the old Tropicana, for a blowjob. She seemed happy to oblige. Probably thought it was the natural way for a girl to reward her man after seeing her mother do the same for various customers every week.

  He found the turnoff on the left, and took the mountain road up and up until he came out on the dusty trail that led off over the top of the next ridge, and here at last the full vista lay before him – the sprawling metropolis of Las Vegas. He had been born here, he had paid for his first whore here, and he had shot his first man here. He hated the place.

  And loved it.

  *

  23.45 Las Vegas; 07.45 London

  Walking the street before Heatherley, Jack moved quietly and cautiously. His abiding fear was that he might be seen and reported to the police, so he walked along slowly, but with purpose. Not a dangerous burglar, but a man tired after a long day at work, whose car had broken down, and who was forced to walk homewards with his rucksack full of work for the following morning.

  He had driven to a mall before coming here. There, he found a small security store that specialised in preventing industrial espionage. He told the young salesman that he ran a computer security company, but that reports of meetings he had held with a client were
in the papers. That meant he was worried that his meetings room had been bugged and that there could be a video camera installed to spy on his meetings. Was there any way to locate video cameras and stop them broadcasting data?

  After listening to his concerns, the salesman had been fascinated by the problem and began to riffle through magazines and sales catalogues, eventually presenting Jack with a small box the size of a walkie-talkie. He said if there was a video in his room, this receiver could check the picture it was sending. It meant he could line up the picture with the room, so he could locate the bug more easily, and if he wished, there was some equipment that should prevent any company spies from learning anything: jamming systems that prevented wifi transmission of signals. Most modern videos were wireless, and those jammers would work fine, he said.

  He drove off with his purchases and filled up at a garage a couple of blocks further on. He bought two canisters of instant foam for filling flat tyres and a small LED torch, before carrying on to within a mile from Heatherley, where he parked his rental before walking the last stage to make sure that he got a clear feel for the neighbourhood. So far, he was confident that this was a good area. The cars were often BMWs or Mercedes, with a fair number of Jaguars, as well as the normal Chryslers, GMs and Fords. Few appeared to have any dents. The houses themselves were good, substantial looking places with stone walls and cool tiled roofs. It was the sort of place Jack would have liked to live. Warm all year round, it would suit him after the cold of Dartmoor, he thought, but then pushed all thoughts of Devon away. He had to concentrate.

  The house was set well back from the road, and had electric gates. Jack wandered past, giving it barely a glance. His attention on this pass was all for the other houses in the street. It was a pleasant, wealthy road with plenty of houses. The real estate developers had squeezed as many buildings into the road as possible. However, he saw that three Yukka plants and a low hedge a little further along blocked the view of the houses opposite. It was here that he took a rest. There was no one looking that he could see. He slipped into a shadow, away from the street lighting, and stopped, listening. Apart from the rumble of traffic on the freeways, there was nothing to disturb him. He moved to the wall and stood again, listening. There was a camera, he saw, set high on the wall, which gave a full view of the gates and the inner walls. Inside, he knew there must be more. That wasn’t his concern at present.

  He opened his rucksack, took out the video signal jammers, and set them on the ground near him. With the video interceptor he scanned for local wireless video, and soon located the camera above him by the transmitted signal. He took one of the signal jammers and turned it on. The tiny LED lights flickered for a few moments, and then the three lights were steady. As they became fixed, the picture on his interceptor became snowy, and then faded to a mess of white static. He threw his rucksack over his back again, and with the interceptor and jammer in his pocket, he looked about him quickly, and then sprang up to the top of the wall. It took some scrabbling, but at last he was on the wall. He left the signal jammer there, and sprang down the other side. The monitor still showed that the signals were jammed, and, as the store’s salesman had assured him that they would work over wide spaces, he was fairly happy that he was safe from being filmed, but he was keen not to run risks. He went over the gravel in a hurry, and soon he was at the wall, staring up at the alarm bell housing. From his pack he took one of the aerosols for a flat tyre. Bringing a large pot that held a shrub over to beneath the alarm, he stood on it and injected the quick-expanding foam in through the alarm’s grille . As soon as it started to escape, he moved the nozzle to a new opening and squirted again until the housing was full. Then he quickly wiped away all the excess so his work was unnoticeable, and moved the plant pot back to where he had found it. He walked around the back of the house, checking with his video that the jammers were still working. There was no second bell housing at the rear of his house.

  It was time to get inside.

  It was a source of amusement to the locksmiths at the little Hertfordshire manor house where the Service sent its recruits to learn breaking and entering, that so many people would install the most expensive, strong, and effective locks on their front doors, and use progressively less secure fastenings on others. Here, Sorensen had two strong Chubb locks on the front door. His back door used one, and the lock to the garage door only had a standard five lever.

  Jack pulled on latex gloves that he had bought at a drugstore. Breaking the lock took only a few moments, and then Jack was inside, his second jammer in his hand as he stared up at the video cameras inside the house. He took out his video interceptor and checked it. There was still no signal.

  The garage door led into a utility area, and it was here that he saw the alarm with the flashing red LED. He had expected that there would be something, but when he looked at this, he was relieved he had stopped the bell. If he hadn’t, it would be ringing constantly now.

  He moved quickly and methodically through the house. There was no evidence of feminine influence in any of the rooms. The whole house was rigorously masculine in decoration and tidiness. Jack hoped he was right. He didn’t want the complication of a woman suddenly appearing.

  The utility room took him through to a small but well-appointed kitchen, with dark granite worktops and plenty of oak cupboards. Beyond that was a large, open sitting room with a dining table at the nearer side, and a fifty-inch plasma screen on the wall, with a pair of soft leather sofas facing it. Behind them there was a large, old-fashioned desk, and he crossed the cool, tiled floor to it. He opened the drawers, peered inside, and felt around in them with his gloved hands. Nothing there.

  As he felt underneath the desk, he found a steel box. It was clearly a pistol safe, and he studied it for a moment. There was some form of touch-sensitive lock with four buttons, and he lay under the desk for a while, studying it with his torch, but he could not make sense of it, and gave up.

  Instead he carried on up the stairs, checking the video interceptor periodically as he went. There was no sign of a safe or other security measure up here, but he did find a set of old storage boxes in a small bedroom. One was full of records and photos from Sorensen’s time in Iraq. He went through that quickly, glancing at the photos, but for the most part skimming documents. Most seemed to relate to possible corruption charges and, from the look of the discharge papers, Sorensen was not covered in glory at the end of his military career. Jack perused his working record, and lost all sense of time.

  He was still there reading, when he heard the sound of the gates creaking open. Moving quickly, he went to the window and peered out carefully, his torch off. The gates to the driveway were sliding back, and a Mercedes coupe was rolling up the gravel. The lights swept around the house.

  Sorensen was home early.

  *

  23.49 Las Vegas; 07.49 London

  Debbie was at the computer terminal, staring at it with bleary eyes, when she paused and stretched.

  In all her years at the agency, the one rule she’d always stuck to had been this: never, at any time, would she ever look on another agent as a possible bedfellow.

  It never worked. The women in the partnership, if they were better or worse didn’t matter, they would be moved. The guys were safe enough. Testosterone meant stability in the FBI. Besides it was better that way, sometimes. If a girl stayed in the same unit, there could be friction. She would have a reputation in no time: the office bike, if they thought she slept around, the office dyke if she didn’t. And Debbie had seen it before: one guy had propositioned a girl in her third year in Atlanta, and when she turned him down, rumours began to circulate. The men would nod and wink if she showed friendship with other women in the unit. She wasn’t gay, so far as Debbie knew, but that wouldn’t stop the talk.

  If a woman did take another agent home, and stayed with only the one guy, the other members of the team could become too protective, and that was often worse. It could mean that lives could be put at risk
. It wasn’t worth it, not on any level. The men would occasionally get promoted, but if a woman was to hang about, she could cause problems.

  It all made sense. She knew it. Among equals it was fair enough. But when there was the added spice of different ranks involved, that just made it a whole lot more complex. Then instead of simple jealousy, there was the suggestion that the girl was sleeping her way to the top. And Debbie would never tolerate rumours of that sort. No. Better to be thought of as a cold, heartless bitch.

  But it was hard, sometimes.

  She sighed and stared at the screen again, and something caught her eye as she looked through her notes.

  It was among the photos on the screen – the picture that she had shown Frank earlier. Now she frowned slightly as she looked at the photo of the guards at the prison. Perhaps there was another link here. She began to search back through her reports. There was one that detailed the death of McDonnell and also gave the names of other men from the prison. Several were shown to have left the military afterwards. She took their names and scribbled them down before searching for their present occupations and locations. It took her more than an hour of searching through the different databases. Only one had been logged as a felon, and he was on death row after shooting an old woman in Philadelphia while trying to rob her to feed his drug habit. Then her eye caught another man.

  An expert in security systems, in comms, and in interrogation. He had been with McDonnell in Abu Ghraib, and soon after the riots, he had quit the army and moved to here, to Vegas.

  She felt that rush of excitement as she took down his details. When she checked his employment history, she saw that he was in charge of security now at the Mirage. And then she looked back at the picture, and saw that his face was there, right next to McDonnell’s.

  ‘Shit! Frank!’ she called, and hurried through to his office.

  *